While unrest in Turkey continues to capture attention, more subtle and more telling events concerning the Islamification of Turkey—and not just at the hands of Prime Minister Erdogan but majorities of Turks—are quietly transpiring. These include the fact that Turkey’s Hagia Sophia museum is on its way to becoming a mosque.

Why does the fate of an old building matter?

Because Hagia Sophia—Greek for “Holy Wisdom”—was for some thousand years Christianity’s greatest cathedral. Built in 537 in Constantinople, the heart of the Christian empire, it was also a stalwart symbol of defiance against an ever encroaching Islam from the east.

After parrying centuries of jihadi thrusts, Constantinople was finally sacked by Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its crosses desecrated and icons defaced, Hagia Sophia—as well as thousands of other churches—was immediately converted into a mosque, the tall minarets of Islam surrounding it in triumph.

Then, after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, as part of several reforms, secularist Ataturk transformed Hagia Sophia into a “neutral” museum in 1934—a gesture of goodwill to a then triumphant West from a then crestfallen Turkey.